Richard Stengel: A Window on Momentous Events

If eyes are the windows of the soul, then photojournalism is the window on the most momentous events of our time. Great pictures are a way of arresting significant moments in a fast-changing year — and then framing those moments for history. This year, under the leadership of our new director of photography, Kira Pollack, we've brought back a venerable TIME franchise, the Year in Pictures.

Great and enduring photojournalism is one of the hallmarks of TIME, and our distinctive photo-essays go back to World War II combat photography. Pollack's team spent the past several months combing through thousands of images, searching for pictures that give extra insight into the events of 2009. We looked for impact, like Dennis M. Sabangan's photo of people displaced by floods in the Philippines; for surprises, like the shot Kate Westaway took of a playful humpback whale while she was snorkeling; and for poetry, like Douglas Mills' resonant picture of the Kennedy family at the burial of Senator Edward Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery — a poignant moment captured after all the other cameras had turned away.

We also have a brief retrospective of some of Callie Shell's unique behind-the-scenes pictures of President Obama over the past year, including a fresh and distinctive round of images from just last week. The package also includes pictures from long-term art projects like Andrew Moore's photographs from his two-year undertaking in Detroit (which complements our yearlong focus on that struggling American city) and a picture by Richard Mosse of a surveillance balloon on a U.S. military base in Iraq, shot while working on a series on Saddam's palaces.

"I have been a witness," TIME's legendary photographer James Nachtwey once said, "and these pictures are my testimony." We have tried something new this year, and that is to get the literal testimony — the words and voices — of the photographers themselves talking about their pictures. It's a way of taking all of us with them on their mission, seeing their images through their eyes. So we have Nachtwey reflecting on his photograph of an Afghan amputee, and David Guttenfelder explaining how he took his haunting image of Marines sleeping in one-man trenches in Afghanistan's Helmand province. The Marine in the middle is Corporal Kurtis Lee Baller — and we even found his wife, who instantly recognized him in the picture. "I knew it was Kurtis right away because that's how he sleeps at home," she said. "Not in a hole, but when he sleeps on the couch, he's got his arms crossed across his chest and his head tilted to the side like he is here." Above, we have a snapshot of Guttenfelder getting some rest between his assignments in Afghanistan.

Today not all the unforgettable photojournalism is being done by professional photojournalists. For instance, in Tehran, when ordinary Iranians rose up to protest the presidential election, the banishment of the international press made the images of citizen journalists the only ones we could see. We have a page of the best of citizen journalists' images, and you can see more of the Year in Pictures and all our superb photographers and their testimony on TIME.com.

See the top 10 everything of 2009.

See the top 10 magazine covers of 2009.